Definitions and the weight of definitions are wild and easily manipulated. For instance, conspiracies by definition 100% exist and are 100% exposed — often to surprisingly little actual impact unless murder is involved somewhere and maybe not even then — on a regular basis. Let’s call these conspiracies — definite participants with definite consequences — “Tier One.”
Tier One Conspiracies: Business as Almost Usual
Company A teams up with Place B to snatch Resource C from the inhabitants. Some rich someone has an area [or company] declared low value before buying it up. Smaller scale ones where groups of people plan out crimes. Large scale ones where countries devalue a target to take over trade routes.
This is before you get to stuff like MKUltra and other exposed government plots/programs to do stuff outside of standard channels of morality/expectation. These are probably getting close to what I consider “Tier Two,” which will come up in a bit.
Tier Three Conspiracies: The Fourth Element
However, these “Tier One” conspiracies are differentiated from a different sort. I am not going to do math because it is almost impossibly complicated, but for at least some folks, perhaps most folks, this is not what is meant when you encounter the word Conspiracy Theory.
Let’s call this extreme “Tier Three.” In principle, there is a indefinite amount of agents involved and the goal seems something almost ineffable (insomuch as “Total Control” is ineffable). Like the agents behind Tier Three conspiracies are attempting godhood. Thinking about that, I’m going to propose “The Fourth Element” and discuss it in brief, down below.
There are varying lists of elements involved on this other extreme (see the European Commission’s page about COVID conspiracies to see a specific flavor), to which I would point out three (from my experience) as being deeply related to the fourth:
- Manichean divide between GOOD and BAD and I don’t mean just simply “naughty people” but a sense that these people are akin to Biblical portions of BAD
- Shadowy, secretive cabal of multi-faceted interests: government, business, press, science, industry, religion (“It goes deep!”)
- Importantly: A keyhole where people who know can look through the door but said keyhole is not so obvious that it is just “clear as day” to your average person
The (often) lack of clearly defined morality, the (often) singular- or few-facet structure, and the fact that real Tier One conspiracies (usually) get spoiled violate these tenets. There’s a game to be played with conspiracy theories by my Tier Three definition where True Believers can see a bit further into the darkness and plainness.
Which brings us to the fourth element, the one I consider the key, the actual test of this tier three definition:
- A conspiracy theory of the third tier is essentially indistinguishable from a religion requiring faith, an inner circle, ritual language, and a reshaping of worldviews and stems from the same part of our brain that processes religious conceptualization
- THE OTHER is mostly conceptualized outwardly from THE SELF, so that different adherents will believe in variations based on their own personal history; though adherents will subscribe to the belief they are are using their faith and secret language to expose objective truth
- There are GOOD OTHERS and BAD OTHERS talked about in dehumanizing terms, each, with the important that some OTHER AGENTs are on the side of goodness — generally the “side” of the conspiratorial belief holder themselves — and some are against it
Believing that billionaires will manipulate the market to improve their own profit margins is not, by the Tier Three definition, a conspiracy. It is plain. It involves known actors doing a possible-to-actually-know thing. You could give evidence clearly that all adherents can appreciate.
You would need to believe they are doing it to bring about an ineffable end, some great ritual, some mystic passing. In this, people who are part of the shadowy world will be both fighting for and fighting against the common person. Some billionaires will be the good ones. Some government agents will be exposing the truth behind UFOs. There will be codes and secret signs left behind.
However, I am left with the sense that there are broad movements and there are general shifts by powerful players but not codified in quite the same way. What if snack companies push less-filling, brightly colored snacks not because they are working for Satan (to ape a chain letter of many years ago) but because they want you to get fat and feel like a loser for not choosing one product from one of their subsidiaries over another of their subsidiaries?
Towards a Tier Two Definition
Which is making me wonder if there’s not space for a Tier Two definition:
- TIER ONE: DEFINITE agents for a DEFINITE purpose.
- TIER TWO: (largely) DEFINITE agents for a perhaps DEFINITE purpose but through INDEFINITE instability.
- TIER THREE: (largely) INDEFINITE agents for an INDEFINITE or DEFINITE purpose (but usually the DEFINITE purpose is a facet of a much larger INDEFINITE one).
Look, it’s a broad musing and a work in process. I know this is fallible. I’m chewing on it. This is the part of the canvas where I have to throw paint all over the room just to figure out which colors match. Much like the algorithms that push various problematic memes to see which one stick and be manipulated into generational trauma…
*wink*
What I’m wondering, though, is if you could have a group of people — maybe not precisely known at present but in principle definitely knowable with clearly defined lines — who interfere with things, perhaps in definite ways, usually with a definite goal, but with indefinite consequences.
Which is wrong. Throwing paint, like I said. It’s more like…
Generating indefinite instability in order to generate certain types of behavior in the short or long term with the assumption that some classes of people are more immune to large and small scale instabilities.
One odd aspect of this “Tier Two” is that…
- It’s not necessary for every agent group to be actively working together, just that they are participating in trends towards instability
A Tier One conspiracy would be like, say, a tobacco company or conglomerate of said companies making cigarettes more addictive. A Tier Three would be tobacco companies making cigarettes more addictive so that people absorb more chemicals and become conditioned towards government mind control backed up by a shady group of academic elites.
This type of Tier Two I am talking about would be various companies following trends of marketing and science to general make their product more addicting but then also paying for advertisement and education against addiction to harm competitors but also to increase distrust in science and regulation amongst their addicted regulars. Either they win by creating tribal-like brand dependency or by having people eventually thinking that “both sides” are problematic.
Oil companies making broad statements against renewable energies while also co-opting and sometimes controlling green initiatives for instance. Where wind power’s actual impact on local ecosystems can be treated as just-as-bad-as the extinction level event that fossil fuels can represent.
Complain about fossil fuels? Why do you hate small communities in Africa?
Promote veg*nism and a move from factory farms? That’s racist.
Algorithms pushing coverage for relatively minor infractions by environmentalists vs an over-emphasis on largely meaningless gestures. People being bullied for personal responsibility over the environment catastrophe vs people being portrayed as powerless against effective change (aka “the paper straw” strawman bullshit).
Co-opting “freedom of speech” as a way to attack personal freedoms. Or changing the meaning of “fake news.”
Algorithms that highlight catastrophizing and doom-scrolling. Creating a media landscape where brain-rot short-form media is both becoming a default and also complaining about it is becoming a default.
AI discussions where complaints or praises of it mean nothing because your average user cannot do a goddamned thing either way. Right up to complaining about the em-dash and oxford commas and all the other ways anti-AI sentiment is being used to dissolve standards of human communication. And yes, I filled this post with hand-coded — just to be pissy. I had to click extra for that shit.
Where Gen X was sold both anti-establishment and pro-establishment media. Anti-intellectual and pro-intellectual media. Told to trust the scientists we were told to mock as eggheads. Told to trust the government we were told to hate. Told to eat the food we were told to hate.
Where the only consistent thing was that we were told to consume.
To choose sides. To choose no sides. To engage. To be enraged. To qualify things that should be quantifiable. To quantify things of indefinite qualities. Where even the “generational system” of organization — Gen X, Millennials, etc — is nothing but bullshit pseudo-science to make us feel like we are striving for a horizon that has never existed. And if you complain about the labels? There’s a label for that, too.
“Here’s a box, get inside, please. Oh, don’t like the box? Me too! I hate boxes, subscribe to my newsletter!”
Because in the end that’s all that matters. Not the stance that we take. Not that we take a stance. There’s no stance we can take. As long as internalize it, though, as long as we think the stance or lack of stance is a thing, we consume. Just to show them.
That’s what I’m talking about. Where it’s not just about the doubt vs belief, identity vs the unknown, embracing conflict vs finding compromise: it’s about how we internalize these things and keep clicking more links. Thinking we have to fight but never quite knowing what it is we are fighting (plot twist: we are fighting our wallets to sign up for more online services, quite often). Thinking we are doomed but we might as well be playing on the Titanic and then getting fucking furious at people for playing on the Titanic while not thinking they are doomed in the exact same way.
We end up terribly judging who are just as intellectually complex and emotional extant as ourselves because the goddamned algorithm needed there to be an A and B or what the hell is A-B testing for?
I have to go chew on this and make more sense on approach two, assuming I get around to it.